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Saturday, December 31, 2011

Are you a Member of our GeeksonTour.TV website?

I know that a lot of you are members on our business website, so I normally don't write much about it here, on our personal blog – I don’t want to bombard you.

If you are a member, we thank you! Because of you, we can continue this wonderful lifestyle and not have to get a real job! If you aren’t a member, now is the time to join because our prices go up next week. You can read more about it in our latest newsletter.

What is a Membership Website?

Let me give you a look behind the scenes. Our work is Computer Training for Travelers – and we love what we do! In order to make a living at it, we use the Internet and a Membership website. What this means is that our tutorial videos are all available on that site, but if you click to watch one, you will be asked for a username and password. That’s the membership part. We use WordPress to create the website, and a plugin called WishList Member to manage the parts that require a login. We use PayPal to manage the payments so we don’t have to be responsible for handling or storing people’s credit card numbers. Here’s more info on why we think a PayPal account is a good idea for everyone.

As with any way of making a living, there is a lot of work involved. Managing the website is a big job – there are constant updates, and issues to deal with just in making the website work right. Then, of course there are the videos that must be recorded to have something to sell! When we started charging for it in 2008, we had a few dozen videos, now we have over 200.

We also have to work to drum up business. Think of us like Rock Stars (I like that!) we go on tour with our seminars to build recognition and promote our tutorial videos on our website. Some venues pay us a little to present seminars, but many do not. Usually they let us sell our memberships, books, and DVDs. Just like you can buy the Rock Star’s CD after the concert! We also write lots of free articles for our newsletters and other websites.

Many people stay on our free newsletter email lists for years and may never become a paid member. That’s OK! They tell other people about us – it’s how it works. We have over 5,000 email subscribers and about 800 paid members. If everyone became a member – it would be too much work for us! And lots of people receive our free newsletters for a while and then, later, sign up for a paid membership. We like that, the newsletters let them get to know us. We’ve even had some people just send us money to say thank you for all the free information they’ve received over the years!

We also write articles on free websites, like our PicasaTutorials,RV.net, and DigitalRVer. Last but definitely not least, our Facebook page is becoming our favorite way to communicate with everyone and offer free tidbits of our computer training for travelers.

Inspiration

"There’s a myth that time is money. In fact, time is more precious than money. It’s a nonrenewable resource. Once you’ve spent it, and if you’ve spent it badly, it’s gone forever."— Neil Fiore: Author, speaker, and trainer on managing business